by Jon Land
“No standard gives you the right to kill seventeen people.”
“Each man has as much right as he has power. Would you not admit to killing more than seventeen yourself?”
Kimberlain didn’t respond.
“Was it any more right for you? Or wrong? I think not. The deed is not judged in its own context, it is its own context. The beast in us wants to be lied to, and judgments form these lies. But my renewal began when I stopped judging myself or letting myself be judged. Was your killing any more justified because it was for a cause? I see in your soul much of what I see in my own. I see both of us striving to provide balance for our actions. We are held prisoners in a moral cell of our own making, and its bars are much stronger than the ones I’m holding now.”
“So you’ve seen the light. Is that it?”
“We both have. But you are free to seek your renewal, while mine must remain a state of mind rather than being. My renewal has cast me as the master of myself. My mind has sharpened. I was punished for my crimes, and now I am being punished for my desires. He who deviates from the traditional falls victim to the extraordinary; he who remains in the traditional becomes its slave.”
“Nothing human is worthy of being taken very seriously, Peet.”
The giant smiled for the first time. “Plato. I’m impressed, Ferryman. But the man who has overcome his passions has entered into possession of the most fertile ground for ripening thoughts. These killings are a sign.”
“Sign of what?”
“That the time for my reentry into the world has come. You can’t win alone this time. You are fighting forces you cannot possibly comprehend.”
“I don’t believe in monsters, Peet.” And, eyeing him tightly, “Not anymore.”
“Not monsters, Ferryman, causes.”
“A cause didn’t mutilate Jordan Lime.”
“But it unleashed the energy which did. Raw and untempered.”
“One man and more than one,” muttered Kimberlain, repeating Peet’s earlier words.
“The force behind what you are pursuing cannot be adequately measured. Alone you’re no match for it.” Peet’s tone became almost pleading. “Release me from this prison so that I may purge my final demons and conquer the enemy by your side.”
“I couldn’t do that even if I wanted to.”
“Then why did you come here, Ferryman? Was it to question me about the murders, or was it for a different reason? Have you avoided the mirror for so long that you needed to see what your reflection looked like? Have you lost touch with the side of you I represent?”
Kimberlain held the giant’s stare while he backed away. “Have a great life in there, Peet.”
“That which does not kill me, Ferryman, makes me stronger.”
Before leaving The Locks, Kimberlain received a message that Captain Seven wanted very much to see him at the Lime estate. He was glad for that, as much as anything because it took his mind off his strangely unsettling encounter with Peet. During the boat ride back to the mainland and the long drive south, he searched for reasons to hate the man who had almost killed him, but his search came up empty. He wanted to feel as he had in the courtroom when he testified, wanted to feel as he had when the judge announced the sentence and his first thought had been to grab one of the guard’s guns and pull the trigger, as he should have in Medicine Lodge. Today, though, he could find no hate in him for Peet. He wondered if indeed this was a different man from the one he had captured, and if so, how different might he himself have become without realizing it?
Back in Greenwich, Kimberlain found Captain Seven seated in the middle of the Lime mansion’s huge center staircase. He had just started munching on a collection of salad greens packed into a pita pocket. A bottle of natural soda stood by his side.
“Woulda brought one for you if I’d known you were gonna join me,” said Seven.
“Some startling revelations would more than make up for it.”
“If you’re talking about what went down here, I’m not ready yet. Close, but not quite. By the way, think you might be able to get your friend Herman off my back?”
“Hermes, not Herman. As in the messenger of the gods.”
“I don’t give a fuck if he runs Western Union, he’s a royal pain in the ass. I work a certain way. Make sure he knows that.”
“I’ll make the point again. I assume your computer turned up some insightful info.”
The captain nodded. “Had a good day. Your three victims were connected all right—through the military.”
“Sounds like too easy a connection for the traditional authorities to have missed.”
“Not when you consider the dumb asses never read between the lines.” Seven continued from memory, as if reading the material straight off his computer monitor. Alfalfa sprouts slid from the corners of his mouth. “Benjamin Turan’s plastic steel will soon revolutionize missile production. Its composition has been estimated to quicken delivery time by up to fifty percent and set radar back fifty years. Adam Rand’s discovery of that hypersensitive transmission will similarly revolutionize tanks and other direct-drive battle vehicles. Speed can be increased on the order of sixty percent.” Captain Seven took another hefty bite from his pita pocket and spoke on through chews. “Jordan Lime’s transistor coupling which resists burnout will soon be state of the art when it comes to weapons systems. It eliminates breakdowns and renders such systems safe from the electromagnetic pulse caused by the detonation of nuclear weapons in outer space. Might not be the most colorful of the three, but it’s the one I’d wager Washington is hottest for.”
“Any of this public?”
“Not on any file the normal mind can access.”
“So our boy is knocking off the heads of companies who’ve recently closed or are about to close major deals with the military,” Kimberlain concluded.
Seven nodded. “Focusing on state-of-the-art discoveries and futuristic technology. Like I said, in none of the cases is the product even close to being on the market yet, so whoever our killer is, he must have a hell of a pipeline. This is strictly deeply buried stuff.”
“How many victims, Captain?”
“Ah, I was hoping you’d raise that issue. At least eleven in addition to the three we know about in the past eighteen months, all industrialists with some kind of military connections eliminated as follows: two shootings, one stabbing, three car accidents, one accidental poisoning, two killed in the process of a robbery, one executed by a terrorist group after being taken hostage, and one who didn’t make it through routine surgery.”
“Then it’s escalating,” Kimberlain said. “The killings are becoming more complex, more technologically oriented. Our boy has faced increased security as he’s gone on and has overcome it with ease. He’s loving this, Captain, I can feel it. What about the next victim I asked you to pin down?”
“Found maybe three hundred potentials, keying off variables pulled from the pattern. I was able to eliminate two hundred and fifty pretty easily and then ran probability factors on those remaining.”
“Who drew the highest?”
“Chick named Lisa Eiseman, president and chairman of the board of TLP Industries, based in Atlanta.”
“TLP Industries. Don’t they make—”
“Yup,” broke in Captain Seven. “Toys. Pioneers and holders of the patent on the interactive memory chip. Made a fortune with their line of the Powerized Officers of War—the POW! dolls.”
“Dolls?”
The captain nodded. “So to speak. TLP’s specialty is toy soldiers.”
Chapter 7
THE PHOTO SHOP was located on Georgetown’s M Street, three blocks from the Four Seasons Hotel. Squeezed between an ice cream shop and a record store, it looked innocuous, right down to the bold sign assuring customers of same-day service on their color prints. On this day, though, the CLOSED sign dangled from the window a full hour before the shop’s advertised seven P.M. closing.
In one of three dark rooms located
in the rear, a man with thick glasses looked up from a developing machine. Switching the developed material to a hypersensitive computer-keyed enhancer, he took another look and then turned his stare through the red half-light at Danielle.
“There it is,” he announced. “Not terrific, but the best I can do.”
Danielle moved her eye to the lens to see whatever he’d been able to reconstruct of the burned pages. She had left for Washington as soon as the preliminary results had been revealed to her. During the long flight across the Atlantic she tried to sleep, but every time she dozed off she was seized by a fuzzy dream of her parents, seen only from the rear since she had no real memory of them. The dreams always came at times of maximum stress, as if to remind her of the path that had brought her to where she was. Her parents were mere shadows in her memory, dark and without definition. More vividly she remembered an endless succession of refugee camps in Lebanon. In each she was given a different name, but the real hell did not begin until she was twelve. Thin and frail, yet mysteriously attractive, she was lighter-skinned than the other girls but with the darkest eyes of any.
The first man to force himself upon her smelled of liquor and sweat and drove a pain through her like none she thought possible. And when he was done, he had dragged her bloodied body into his tent, where more men were ready to take their turn. As the first of them mounted her she felt the pain even worse than before. She wanted to scream but lacked the strength; she thought of holding her breath until she was dead.
Suddenly three well-dressed men stormed into the tent. The savage on top of her was yanked off and his throat slit as guns were drawn on his fellows. Then a concerned-looking man who smelled good gently lifted her from the floor as she passed out.
When she came to, it was daytime and she was being led out of a car with vague memories of flying in a jet larger than those that buzzed the camps constantly. She was wearing clean, fresh-smelling clothes that were almost her size. Before her was a camp not at all like the others. It had gardens and buildings instead of tents, and there were spacious grounds and woods. The compound was enclosed by a waist-high stone fence rather than the barbed wire she had grown up staring at. The buildings contained rooms laid out in dormitory fashion with six children in each. By the time she was escorted to hers, more fresh new clothes had been stacked neatly in a chest of drawers, and still more hung in her closet. Dinner that night was the greatest meal of her life, the food hot and plentiful, and Danielle—though she had not yet come to be called that—almost cried with happiness.
There were fifty or so other children present, and she was among the oldest. Many of the others looked to be no more than five or six. Danielle watched as a new world began to open up for her. She had never seen so many different kinds of people with different skin, hair, and eyes. All seemed happy to be there.
The lessons started almost immediately. Danielle had had virtually no schooling up to this point, and the work was hard, including courses in math, science, and a variety of languages including French, English, and German. She learned fast, completed her work diligently, and often had to be prodded to go outside to play with the others in the neatly sculptured gardens. Her world began at the stone fence and ended in the woods. Still, it was a massive world compared to what she had been used to for as long as she could remember. The children were encouraged to run free in the rolling expanse of wooded land at the back of the compound. Hide-and-go-seek was the favorite game, and it grew more elaborate as the months passed. The children’s training had begun though they didn’t know it, even as their numbers slowly dwindled. Occasionally at night a child would disappear without question or explanation.
For her own part Danielle was too engrossed in her studies to notice. She thoroughly enjoyed the new challenges presented her almost daily, and she began to thrive. She mastered the languages with ease, along with other complex subjects such as world currency tables and various laws for entry and exit visas. Here again she did not question; she simply learned.
The years passed and Danielle grew taller and more ravishing. Of her original batch of children, barely a third remained. Friendships were not encouraged, and she had made none. She knew she was being singled out by the men who were her instructors, knew she was excelling in the complicated field games added to the classroom work. Drilling in hand-to-hand combat and weaponry had started, and the remaining children accepted this as easily as everything else. After all, the one thing that held all of them together was that before coming here they had all lived with violence. With such a perspective, nursed almost from birth, there was no resistance to the training they were now required to undergo. It was simply a part of life.
Danielle excelled at the training. She approached the drills and practice sessions diffidently yet with the same precision with which she attacked her studies. The ones who failed, both boys and girls, seemed to be trying too hard. For her it all came easy. In the camps she had known neither failure nor success, just depression and destitution. Her new life taught her that failure need not exist at all. Everything depended on attitude, and she learned to become the master of hers.
If only she had known, then …
Then what? That night in the woods when the second phase began, when she became Danielle, maybe she would have let herself die. But they had pushed the right buttons to activate the desired response. They had made her in the image they desired, and she had become their prisoner, instead of a prisoner of the camps. That night in the woods had accomplished the final forging of her persona, determining her shape through years to come until …
“ … so I couldn’t make any sense of the contents of the pages under standard infrared or ultraviolet,” the man with thick glasses was explaining. Danielle realized her mind had drifted while her eye had been pressed to the lens. She looked up from it. “So what I did,” the man continued, “was I retreated the pages entirely. Risky business since we mighta lost everything in the process, but I laid the overcoating on by hand to assure the smoothest impression, and”—dramatically now—“voilà!”
Danielle returned her eye to the lens and spun the focusing wheel. The picture that sharpened was the government seal that had drawn her here in the first place.
“Yes,” she commented. “I told you about that.”
“You told me it was just government. Actually it’s a Defense Department seal reserved for the touchiest documents. Top secret, highly classified, and all that sort of stuff. Anyway, you actually brought me fragments of two separate documents, from what the salvaged excerpts indicate. The one you’re looking at now was the most damaged. It was probably lifted off microfilm which would have meant loss of resolution even without the fire. Best I could do was that one seal and a single word noteworthy for its repetition.”
“What word?”
“Spiderweb.”
“That’s all?”
“That and the fact it was under what they call ULTSEC for ‘ultra-secret.’ The second document wasn’t as badly burned, and it was infinitely more interesting.” The man carefully slid the piece of retouched Kodak paper aside and placed another sheet beneath the computer-keyed lens. “Here we go. Have a look.”
Danielle rotated the lens. What she saw was a mass of lines, measurements, and notations that were meaningless to her. “Plans,” she said simply.
“Yes,” the man acknowledged, and he slid the page to place a specific section under the lens. “Now look.”
Danielle’s vision sharped to recognize a pair of letters. “EB … Electric Boat?”
“The very boys up in Groton, Connecticut, who make some rather impressive subs.”
“Then these are plans for a submarine?”
“Fragments of them, yes, and not just any sub either. From what I can gather, you’re looking at the midship of the new Jupiter class of super-Tridents. Soviets would pay a fortune to get their hands on these.” He paused. “Is that what this is about?”
She looked down through the lens again and then back up
at the man. Her eyes hardened.
“Okay,” he said fearfully, “just forget I asked.”
Danielle went back to the lens, mostly to keep the man from seeing any fear in her own face.
The plans for a new class of Trident submarines.
Something in the Defense Department called Spiderweb.
And somewhere a connection between the two.
Chapter 8
COMMANDER MCKENZIE BARLOW lay twisting on his cot fighting against sleep. The battle was between a body that craved rest and a mind terrified that more hours lost would make more distant the awesome task still ahead.
Seventeen days now. Seventeen days of confinement and disgrace aboard his own ship. Seventeen days. In that period Mac had been allowed out of his quarters on only five occasions and then only to transmit a code signaling that all was well on board the Rhode Island.
A lie. A great big fucking lie.
The Rhode Island was the prototype for a new class of super-Trident submarines, twenty percent larger than the last generation and at least that much faster. She could remain submerged indefinitely, and the transport of her deadly cargo of twenty-eight nuclear missiles was totally at the discretion of her commanding officer.
At least it had been.
Those missiles, with more than ten thousand times the explosive force of the bombs used on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, were deadly accurate, thanks to the wonders of microchip technology. The Rhode Island’s Jupiter-class missiles alone made her the third-greatest nuclear power on Earth, capable of knocking out seventy-three percent of the Soviet populace on her own. But aside from her power and speed, the Rhode Island’s greatest feature was that she couldn’t be tracked—not by Soviet forces, and not by her American counterparts. Even her routine messages were bounced off so many beacons that only a rough estimate of her position could be gained. In fact, one of the major purposes of the Rhode Island’s maiden voyage was to see whether SOSUS (sonar surveillance system) could come close to tracking her. The system, composed of hundreds of powerful sensors lodged on the bottom of the sea, was designed to follow the paths of Soviet Victor and Charlie subs. It was the most sophisticated in the world, and if the Rhode Island’s silent running could evade detection by it she could evade detection by anything.